J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Dominating this west-facing view is a detailed rendering of the eastern façade of the Church of Santa Maria della Spina, located on the south bank of the River Arno in Pisa. It is labelled above with the artist’s inscription ‘Espina’. Built in the Gothic style, this small medieval church was named after the reliquary it once housed, ‘spina’ meaning thorn. In 1871, decades after Turner’s visit, the perpetual risk of flood damage prompted the decision to completely dismantle and reassemble the building at a high level on the embankment, where it still stands today. On examining the reconstructed church, John Ruskin reportedly criticised the project’s poor execution.1

In around 1832, Turner executed the watercolour vignette Santa Maria della Spina, Pisa (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; WA1861.12), which later entered the collection of John Ruskin.2 The vignette was originally commissioned and engraved to illustrate The Works of Lord Byron, published by John Murray between 1832–3 and edited by Thomas Moore, who also contributed a biography of the poet (Tate impression: T06182).3 The vignette featured as the frontispiece to the fifth volume, illustrating a section on Byron’s stay in Pisa in 1821–2, a few years before Turner’s visit in 1828.4 Byron lived in the Casa Lanfranchi on the opposite bank.5 While Turner’s watercolour was reportedly based on a sketch by the artist William Page (1794–1872), it shares compositional features with the present sketch, the key difference being the addition of numerous boats in the watercolour version, as noted by Luke Herrmann.6 As David Blayney Brown observed, Turner’s watercolour ‘throws the picturesque Gothic spires of Sta Maria into high relief’, a feature similarly apparent in the present sketch.7

Visible beyond the church is the Ponte della Cittadella; the version shown here is the original twelfth-century stone bridge, which collapsed due to flooding in 1869. Its iron replacement was destroyed during the Second World War and replaced once more with the current concrete and stone version. The same view now features another bridge, the Ponte Solferino, which lies between the Ponte della Cittadella and the Santa Maria della Spina. The tower to the right, on the north bank of the Arno, is the Torre Guelfa, a defensive structure built in the early fifteenth century. The minor sketch across the top of the page offers an unobstructed view of the Ponte della Cittadella. The Torre Guelfa in the top-right corner spills over onto folio 54 verso opposite (D21518).

See under folio 31 recto (D21472) for a general commentary on Turner’s visit to Pisa, together with a list of relevant works in the sketchbook.